Big ship supremacy... Can little ships keep up?

[Parasite]

In older times, it was true that bigger ships were better. Frigates could fight other frigates, but when a cruiser or lesser ship of the line came around, they had to run (and hopefully had the speed to do it.) Bigger ships meant first more, then bigger and longer range guns to hit others before you could be hit. Big battles were for ships of the line to fight, frigates were just used to pass messages.

Later improvements in weapons like the torpedo allowed a small ship to destroy large ships, but could not be used on other smaller very maneuverable ships. This lead to the rock, paper, scissors game where a small ship could kill a big ship, a medium sized cruiser could kill small ships but not really hurt bigger ones and a big ship with large slow guns could kill a medium ships easily, but had a hard time with the small darting destroyers. Later still came fighters and carriers, but that is another thread.

Small ships could be made much more useful with the introduction or modification of a small powerful short range weapon restricted to small hull types or even better with mounts to make them hit better on smaller ships. A reload rate of 10-15 turns and damage in the 2-4000 range might be good. A to-hit adjustment of -90% for a base ships and slowly reducing to zero on smaller ships. Using the opposite adjustment as it takes for fire on the ship has symmetries to it.

A torpedo shot at a cruiser whould be wasted if battleships were around, yet a ship's guns would clear the area around it of smaller enemies if given half a chance. I suspect this would be hard for the AI and firing priorities to build and handle correctly, but it might be interesting to try.